Reactive and order-centered: Agile production process control

The control system is the brain of production and assembly. Although there are very powerful and sophisticated methods and algorithms, relatively few companies use these possibilities to get more out of their production. However, extreme variant diversity, unexpected bottlenecks, rush orders, but also more universal means of production and intelligent material flow systems require a new type of control system.

Flexible and dynamic production environments are a response to ever shorter innovation cycles and a high degree of customer-specific product characteristics.

In order to exploit the full potential of a loose coupling of production resources, current machine statuses must be incorporated into the production control system. Available interfaces, such as those provided by the OPC UA Companion specifications or AAS models, enable standardized access to the statuses of production resources.

The resulting permanently available digital representation of the production status is constantly evaluated by the reactive production control system and transferred to an optimized execution sequence. This reactive order-centered production control enables dynamic handling of failures or prioritized orders and reaction to unforeseen events.

Fraunhofer IOSB is developing new modeling methods, algorithms and tools for this type of control.